“Unlimited vacation” sounds great, but not if you don’t know how or when to use it. So Buffer is testing a minimum vacation policy.

It’s one of those mythical and vaunted startup perks, and one of the Buffer perks that tends to entice folks the most: unlimited vacation time. When someone new joins the team, they’re immediately granted as much time away from work as they’d like, no questions asked. Under this non-policy policy, teammates have had some great vacations, including cruises around the world and even a month of sailing the Atlantic.

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But is it really that simple? Well, yes and no. Buffer’s unlimited vacation policy is incredibly generous. But as we’ve grown and evolved, we’ve also gotten some great signals that it can be a bit confusing to know when and how to take time off. When we surveyed our team to get their anonymous thoughts, we began to see a theme emerging. Here’s a sample of comments:

It’d be really cool if we could make clearer taking vacation off and how to approach expensing things.

I think some sort of recommended range of time off can be really helpful.

I’m still struggling to figure out how to plan time off and if I should be asking for permission/advice before making plans.

A bit nervous, with a feeling of guilt and uncertainty about how taking the time off would make the team feel.

Taking time off and recharging is critical to doing your best work, so we knew we wanted to help everyone on the team feel great about planning and taking restorative time away.

Until that time, we needed a way to help teammates feel guilt-free about taking time off and to reduce the cognitive load of figuring out how and when to take time away. We started by getting a baseline. Julian on our data team was kind enough to export our shared Google calendar where teammates log vacation days and holidays (yes, it can get a bit crowded there!) so we could take a look.

We found that the vast majority of our teammates were taking in the range of five to 10 days per year (not quite enough, in our opinion), followed closely by the 10–15 day range (getting closer!).

Buffer is a global company, bringing together teammates from many different countries, cultures, and norms when it comes to time off. So we needed to take into account quite a few perspectives. Our team survey asked a variety of questions around the topic of vacation time. Here’s a look:

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Results showed that there was a wide spectrum in terms of the amount of days off teammates felt comfortable taking–everything from zero days to about four weeks. The mean from a sample size of 55 responses was 9.1 days, which is fairly in line with what the Google calendar data showed us.

And although the U.S. is the only developed country with no minimum protected vacation time, we learned that the average private-sector U.S. worker receives 16 paid vacation days and holidays. The average number of paid vacation days offered by U.S. private employers is generally:

10 days after one year of service

14 days after five years

17 days after 10 years

20 days after 20 years

Using these data points, we determined that we’d love to see folks take a minimum of three weeks’ vacation time, in addition to extra time off for the holidays teammates choose to celebrate.

How could we gently guide more teammates into the 15–20-day range while still keeping the freedom of our no-policy policy?

Beyond sharing recommendations, we also have tried to get much more explicit in terms of describing the best way to share and record time off. We have asked teammates to share plans in advance with their team leads using the following general guidelines:

For a half day or less, three days in advance.

For one to three days off, two weeks in advance.

For longer time off, a month or more in advance is great.

And we’ve added to our list of tools an app called Timetastic that we hope will make it easier to ask for and receive vacation time, track time taken to make sure we’re all getting enough recharging time, and allow all of us to see who’s out of the office at a glance.

Timetastic even allows us to see all team vacations in a super convenient Slack channel:

Buffer’s “People team” (which I am a part of) will keep track of time off on a high level, solely for the purpose of nudging people who haven’t taken the time to disconnect in a while.

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Like many things we do at Buffer, this is a new experiment and we don’t have all the answers. We’re keen to keep a pulse on how these recommendations work and whether we begin to see vacation time inching up. We’re planning check-ins at three months and six months and we’ll keep you posted here.

In future iterations of these recommendations, we’re hopeful to explore ideas like sabbaticals/longer-term unpaid leave outside of family leave and increased recommended vacation time for teammates that have been with Buffer for a longer time. We’ll also be working on more guidance for team leads on encouraging more time away.

This article originally appeared on Buffer and is reprinted with permission.